Archive for April, 2010

Girl Talk. See: Gordon Campbell IV's Girl Talk, About Copyright
In what passes for a public debate here about the flow of young New Zealanders across the Tasman and beyond, the focus is always narrowly economic – on comparative wage levels, and on student debt levels. Far too little emphasis has ...

RNZ this morning carried the news that “new research” now shows that the Rugby World Cup would add an estimated $535 million to the nation’s GDP. At this point in time, it is still unclear whether necromancy, dowsing or feng shui was the method used to detect the rise in ...

Posted in Articles | Comments Off on On RWC fever, and Obama’s Supreme Court choice

Image: Selwyn Manning: ANZAC Day 2008 Dawns in NZ
At the post-Cabinet press conference last Monday, Prime Minister John Key had to field a range of official and personal questions from the press gallery about Anzac Day. Had he ever been to Gallipoli? As a young man on his OE, had ...

Last week when Social Development Minister Paula Bennett named the working group on welfare reform, she also cited in a footnote two experts that the panel could draw on for support – Professor Bob Gregory, an economics professor at Australian National University in Canberra, and Peter Saunders a former Director ...

As the deadline approaches for public submissions on the government’s plans to open up sensitive conservation areas to mining, the likely economic returns to New Zealand remain a complete mystery. We don’t know the economic worth of these deposits – Energy Minister Gerry Brownlee has suggested that we have ...

The new working group on welfare reform to be headed by former Commerce Commission head Paula Rebstock will be looking at schemes of unemployment insurance that exist elsewhere in the world, and Canada is widely regarded as a leading source of policy initiatives in this field. Understandably, the focus ...

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New Zealand's national identity is very much based on our sense of virtuous purity – and the feeling that we can provide a shining example to an outside world riven by conflict and greedy self interest. If only people were more like us. If ...

At the unveiling of Whanau Ora, the government scrapped a key feature that its expert Task Force had deemed to be ‘pivotal’ – namely, that this new system of social service delivery should be run by an independent trust. Instead, it will be run from within the current government system, ...

At the school I attended as a child, any and all queries by parents about the standard of teaching or the content of the syllabus would be met by the stock response: “Take your child elsewhere, then.” End of criticism, since to be Catholic meant an obligation to raise one’s ...